September 21, 2002

Titaniumc version 1.1078 is now publicly available.
User-visible changes since the last public release include:

--- Backend/Runtime changes ---

* Reconfigure the garbage collector to support very large heaps (up to about 
  3GB on 32-bit Linux), fixing the "Too many heap sections" error message

* Optimize the global pointer representation on wide-pointer backends (i.e. 
  *-cluster-* and sp3), and greatly reduce the number of places where threaded 
  backends call the often expensive pthread_getspecific() function

* AMMPI upgrades that significantly reduce communication latency for mpi-* 
  backends

* Added ti.lang.PAPICounter, which provides a language-level interface to the 
  PAPI performance counters on platforms that support it

--- Optimization changes ---

* Geoff Pike's "stoptifu" storage optimizations - loop tiling, fusion, etc.
  Now available via the tcbuild flag: --tc-flags -OStoptifu

--- Miscellaneous changes ---

* Ported Titanium to the following new platforms/environments:
    - GNU Cygwin environment on MS Windows
    - Visual Age C (xlc), the native C compiler on the IBM SP
    - SGI-MIPSPro compiler 64-bit mode on the Origin 2000
    - Compaq Alphaserver TRU64 UNIX & Compaq C
    - ia64-linux Itanium (sequential and smp backends only)
    - Berkeley I-Store (fault-tolerant, user-level ethernet support)

* Fixed PR 423 (Various garbage collector problems on AIX)

* Fixed PR 446 (Kaushik's bug: LQI problem with slice() on grid of global grids)

* Fixed PR 474 (Allocation of arrays with 3 or more levels of array hierarchy)

* Fixed intermittent segfaults inside array copy when copying arrays of global 
  pointers, from a local to remote array, on distributed backends with GC 

* Support for --sequential-consistency on the IBM SP (gcc and xlc)

* You can now run "ident" on any Titanium app and see lots of interesting info 
  about how it was compiled

--- Updated backend information ---

Here are descriptions of the Titanium backends currently available:

* sequential - A single titanium process - useful for testing and debugging.

* smp - This parallel backend runs the Titanium processes as Posix threads
  within a single shared memory space, with fast "narrow" pointers. You
  should specify the number of parallel threads by setting the environment
  variable TI_PFORP = "N/N" (for N threads).

* mpi-cluster-uniprocess - portable, high-performance MPI-based cluster
  backend that should run on any cluster with MPI 1.1 or better

* mpi-cluster-smp - Same as above, but for a cluster of SMP's (CLUMP).
  Each node in the network runs one or more Titanium processes as Posix 
  threads. For more detailed information about using the udp-* backends, 
  see: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/titanium/doc/mpi-backend-usage.txt

* udp-cluster-uniprocess - the portable UDP-based cluster backend that
  should run on basically any set of machines that have sshd and a basic
  TCP/IP stack (they can also take advantage of rexec and GLUnix on the
  NOW and Millennium, respectively).

* udp-cluster-smp - Same as above, but for a cluster of SMP's (CLUMP).
  Each node in the network runs one or more Titanium processes as Posix
  threads. For more detailed information about using the udp-* backends,
  see: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/titanium/doc/udp-backend-usage.txt

* cray-t3e - Runs on the Cray T3E using shmem. This platform has a few
  limitations (notably, the lack of a garbage collector).

* sp3 - Runs on the IBM SP Power3 machine with LAPI as the low-level
  communication system (uses an AM-to-LAPI compatibility layer). This
  backend has now been fixed starting in this release.

* mill-cluster-uniprocess, mill-cluster-smp - these backends were designed
  to support the Via network on Millennium, which is no longer available.
  They may be used in the future to support other Via-based clusters.

* sp2, sp2clump, tera-thread, now-cluster-uniprocess - deprecated backends

--- Miscellaneous notes ---

* The tech report version of the language reference manual (v1.5) is
  available on the Titanium web site:
  http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/titanium/doc/lang-ref.pdf